The bedroom
lies open to the wet vamp of night's continuous noise. The piano in the
teeth is not awake, but a toothache, and I find myself there, the roof
returned, my wife still asleep, undisturbed.

~

The decoration of the body. The decoration
of the body against the iced treeline of the self, the winter birds at
their brightest. The sun there bright as this one, and lowering like this
one, lowering into the self.

~

Every few seconds a snowflake clipping along
on the naked breeze. A bare strip of cerulean (like sky, it is sky) breaking
dark from dark in the dusk's flaming clouds. Every few seconds: a snowflake.

~

I feel my guts brushing gravel fathoms beneath
my heels. The field and its clumped soul of soil, the stars flattened
under the soil, and past them: ice herding against ice, in darkness forever.

~

The clipper flies tonight, green as a fairway
and then white behind the weatherman's hopeless fawning. The roads sit
saltless, the neighbors rattling down their wooden stairs. My thick book
of birds lies open.

~

The letters fly over you, a swarm of southbound
moths, the dream and the bed (two objects the world wishes always to reverse)
bob under the squall. You sleep without moving. You hear none of it, the
yard folding, the ladder's escape.

~

The sea, the sea, and the sea: it rises differently
from each angle of beach. The same sea, many seas. The same gum-pink octopus
imagined beneath the cold ruins of waves, seen again and again and again.

~

The body remembers to pull hard at the cupboard
door, its stubborn latch, even once the latch has been oiled, even after
the brain scolds the arm, elbow, and hand. Even when snow, after a respite,
begins again outside.

~

What you know of skeletons down in the
freshwater weeds corresponds to summer and the stink of fishing, the lake
a hot glare encircling you. You forget ice that gives in, welcomes winter
like a tenant.

~

There is a moment in the flight of certain
ducks when the wings flap overtime to keep the body almost still in the
air, hovering like a huge bee over the world, until the wings collapse
as the feet sink in, the whole settling.

~

There is a moment when I refuse the wine,
when the violet and blue buds in the yard seem angry with sun. The mind
will not cradle too much of any given humor before it laughs and spits
up, before it sleeps.

~

A constant light in the low garden, the worms
dazed, motionless as the grass. The mouth makes a wet ticking, the sound
of a page turned underwater, the old bell of spring that rings inward
before out, rings loud in the groin.

~

The question falls like a sunbeam, like the
sunbeams I had been watching wash the sloped roofs of old buildings when
the question was first asked, the watertower's legs in the distance blending
with bare trees.

~

Every time you look up, the sunset's reefs
of thistle and blood are darker: bruises rising smokelike to the sky's
eroding tideline. Somewhere, your better is preparing for you, expecting
you. A thread of air catches flame.

~

The calves scream when pulled from the utters,
their eyes deep as black marble, the gut-grey storm overhead sends the
splotches of burnt umber and cream into contrast as the calves are dragged
away. The pines grow ever so slightly.

~

The drinks go down like light. A crowd of
birches collect what winter they can, the neck of marsh water beside them
no longer a mirror, no longer a friend. I witness the ice's birch-white
stasis, hear it groan like an animal around me.

~

You mouth the rhythm of spring months
beforehand. You and the rest of the pathetic yard, the leaves you refused
to rake sulking like a giant spread of mold, the swift headlights over
trees, the wine in your hand negated.

~

Each uncountable flip of wave skipping the
lake's whipped face is a coercion, a betrayal grafted to pine shadow,
dove trill. The grind of nothing against air in the ear persists into
sleep, bladder clenched, legs vibrating like a fence.

~

At some point the stranger offers you the
wine. At another, he swings a pistol in your face. The in-between is a
falling of petals, a garden that grows in a day, a music like skates across
weather-thick ice, like climbers on a slope.

~

The moon refuses to cease its cyclical gestures,
eye that takes a month to close. My ribs ache in the shadow of roof, stair,
peg, jamb. The moon anoints the grass into mercury if the clouds are right,
if the mind wakes at such an hour.

~

Snow across the mask of night. The valley
has no bottom, but I stand in it, the gurgle of a river ascending like
saintly chatter somewhere behind my shoulder. I am deepened but immune,
the night a non-revelation, a non-symbol.

~

How the body speeds up to compensate for blood.
How the silver resists tarnish until cast into weeds. How the trees are
bare as organs, ready to sprint toward death, branches becoming other
branches, leaves spilling from nowhere.

__

I wrote "History of Awe"
in the dark span of January through February of last winter. I at first
tried to write just a simple prose poem but the first section didn't feel
autonomous. I added a second section and the poem snowballed from there.
Now months later, it still feels to me like a simple prose poem. All last
winter I was concerned with how the body makes it through such a dangerous
challenge posed by its surroundings. In winter it gets cold and food is
scarce. Of course we've created this ridiculous civilization to provide
protection and comfort, but progress cannot fully wash away instinct.
Once, the snow was not picturesque. Once, we had no gas heaters to draw
the blood back to life. Other animals are smarter: they store up energy
and go to sleep for the duration of winter. I've sometimes felt my brain
enter a similar state while my body remains as helpless and needy as ever.
"History of Awe" was my attempt at waking myself up from the
outside, to find a million threads of observation and metaphor and collect
them in the many-tiered shelf of a prose poem in short sections. In the
end, I think the poem is as concerned with the changing of one season
into another as it is with the constant changing of the world around us,
and as a result it is concerned with the transformation of the imagination
itself.